In The Ghost Fragments, Naomi thinks there are ghosts in her house, a place from which all passion must be removed. She says that someone is moving her furniture during the night. She misses a “him,” a lover in whose office she would change out of her dance clothes into a dress. “Today,” she says, he arrived in New Haven. She says that when she comes back to the house at night there is a light on in the closet, a light she never turns on. She wakes in the middle of the night, hearing voices, and discovers that the tv is on although she turned it off before she went to bed. She thinks ghosts are the residue of unsatisfied desires and, thinking her house haunted, researches old newspapers in the library and discovers that a family was murdered in the house, the father coming home to discover the butchery but finding his youngest daughter hiding in the upstairs closet. She thinks of “him” typing in a small room used by generations of graduate students. She says that the ghost house follows her wherever she goes. She says that, when he was leaving her to go to New Haven, he kissed her and she couldn’t let him go. They made love and, in the morning, she smashed his head again and again with a heavy old clock on the bedstand. She never opens the closet and when the telephone rings she never answers it because she knows who it is.
Don Nigro 